Japan's Damaged Reactor Has High Radiation, No Water 282
mdsolar passes along this quote from an Associated Press report:
"One of Japan's crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and hardly any water to cool it, according to an internal examination Tuesday that renews doubts about the plant's stability. A tool equipped with a tiny video camera, a thermometer, a dosimeter and a water gauge was used to assess damage inside the No. 2 reactor's containment chamber for the second time since the tsunami swept into the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant a year ago. The probe done in January failed to find the water surface and provided only images showing steam, unidentified parts and rusty metal surfaces scarred by exposure to radiation, heat and humidity. The data collected from the probes showed the damage from the disaster was so severe, the plant operator will have to develop special equipment and technology to tolerate the harsh environment and decommission the plant, a process expected to last decades."
Cost per kwatt/h? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder what the average cost of the electricity produced over the life of the plant is now after the tangible costs of clean up are added - not even getting into the collateral radiation damage when cancer rates "mysteriously" rise.
Re:INSIDE THE CONTAINMENT CHAMBER (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOIDFh3wPXY [youtube.com]
Re:~space (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:INSIDE THE CONTAINMENT CHAMBER (Score:5, Interesting)
First, high radiation messes up electronics. I have a tennis-ball sized chunk of natural thorium ore (thorite), that was just lying on the ground in Colorado. Put it near a digital camera, you get a lot of static (~52 uSv/h of gamma alone on a PM1703 if anyone was curious).
So, you've got radiation levels over 1,500,000 times more than my little rock that causes obvious interference, and non-redundant electronics on a prototype probe someone slapped together with minimal testing. I doubt it was all radiation-hardened sapphire circuitry.
I'd just be wary of drawing too many conclusions from a single measurement from a single probe in such an environment. There's a lot of things that can cause imperfect results, even not in nuclear reactors.
High radiation just does weird stuff. At Chernobyl they had to dive into the water to release a valve (suicide mission, obviously). As I recall the first team couldn't even find it, because ultra-intense alpha radiation had turned the water into H2O2 and it oxidized their suits, skin, and equipment too quickly.
I doubt it's hot enough to melt through the concrete, but just sayin'.
Re:~space (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Damn the arrogance, damn the arrogants (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely and utterly agree with what you said, and well said it was too.
It's not the nuclear technology that's wrong, it's the people in charge of running it who are entirely at fault for what happened. The Error Cascade is monumental for Daiichi - not placing the emergency generators up the nearby hill behind the plant, for example.Ignoring people who have been stating for years if not decades, that a 14 meter+ tsunami was more than likely in that area (and others), is another.
There are ancient stone markers all around the coastal areas of Japan, on high ground, left there by previous generations of Japanese, all saying things like "do not build below this level".
And yet, they did. And this is what happens, and their coastal cities and towns get washed away by massive tsunami. And they're planning on rebuilding homes, towns, and cities on the very places that got inundated by tsunami.
After 5+ years of living in this country, I've come to the conclusion that Japan is like a real life gigantic game of Lemmings. If the quakes and tsunami don't get you, then the volcanoes, sulphur gas, flooding, landslides, avalanches, and typhoons will.
But I still agree with you 100% though that civilization cannot live without the energy provided by nuclear power stations, and that's including the Japanese. They just need to re-think the design and layout of any new nuclear plants they might build in the future.
And for those who proclaim that wind and solar are the answer - your grasp of reality is severely depleted. I can see great potential for Japan to use its Geothermal resources, but wind and solar do NOT have the capability to offer a stable and reliable energy supply for a country like Japan, nor do they have the energy density required to supply the cities and towns of that country.
Re:THERE IS NO GEOTHERMAL (Score:5, Interesting)
Do not look at enhanced geothermal systems. They do not exist! Continue to argue the relative merits of nuclear and coal.
There's a reason we aren't considering it. It's not going to replace nuclear/coal any time in the next few decades.
Geothermal is not the cheap, clean, safe renewable locally sourced baseload power you are looking for.
Cheap? You do realize that a) you have to drill a lot of expensive holes, b) maintain a lot of pipes under highly corrosive conditions, and c) start exploiting sources that are low quality or very deep in order to make up for the current production by coal and nuclear?
Safe? I bet it has more deaths per unit of energy produced than nuclear. And you still have to worry about steam explosions and increased earthquake hazard.
Clean? A little circulation through hot bedrock and that fluid will pick up all sorts of interesting heavy metals (and some radioactive isotopes as well). Then it'll leak. And where are you putting all the corroded pipe you replace?
Renewable? Apparently, the current rule of thumb is that half the initial generating capacity comes from the heat content of the rock that you're cooling. Once that goes away, your long term capacity comes only from below. Running a country like Japan will cool a lot of rock and be something like sucking an aquifer dry. Sure, there will be a renewable component, but I wouldn't be surprised, if in some areas they had to drill deeper and deeper because not enough heat was coming to the plant to keep it viable.
Locally sourced? Beats coal, but not nuclear. With a working breeder reactor, Japan could have had enough nuclear power to run for decades without need for imports.
Baseload power? Sure.
Point here is that geothermal while it has some nice features, is not the straightforward choice you present it as.
Re:Damn the arrogance, damn the arrogants (Score:5, Interesting)
In the U.S., we KNOW when we've made mistakes and we learn from them quickly, readily and even hungrily.
How do you explain 30 years of Reaganomics, the war on drugs, private health insurance, etc.?